Teach For America announced today that half of this year’s 5,300 recruits are people of color. The organization has recently changed some of its recruiting techniques to generate a more diverse applicant pool. The U.S. teaching force in general tends to be overwhelmingly white and female, Ed Week’s Stephen Sawchuk notes.

A study by Tom Dee that was published in Ed Next in 2004, “The Race Connection,” found that black students learned more from black teachers and white students from white teachers.